Unholy Death Knight Gear Recommendations

This section of the Unholy Death Knight guide covers everything about gear, stat priorities, gear recommendations from dungeons and raids, and legendary item rankings, updated for World of Warcraft Legion Patch 7.2.5! This guide is currently updated and maintained by Veiss Versa, who has been a raider in various DPS capacities for 9 years, and is currently 7/10M in Nighthold (My guild was 9/10, I missed two kills). You can also find him on YouTube and Twitch.

Note 1: This means that if you cannot reach one of the breakpoints, you should trade Haste into Crit or Mastery until you fall at the breakpoint you can reach comfortably)Note 2: Haste Breakpoints are not greater than item level, especially as Strength and Mastery both outscale Haste for DA, despite skew sim results.Note 3: The haste value must become active and remain static through Arbiter's entire 18 second Active Cast Duration (ACD) in order for the breakpoints to be effective. Ramping Haste (Such as Alptraumeierschale) may result in reaching some breakpoints later on, but will not guarantee you bonus casts for the entire duration.

Legendaries

In this Tier are legendaries that are either absolutely required for synergy with a specific build, or are overwhelmingly strong in their own right.

Kaltes Herz This legendary is first in S-Tier as it offers a truly massive amount of single target damage, regardless of build or spec. It can be paired with anything, anytime.

Seele des Todesgebieters This legendary offers a full talent, and likewise can work in any spec or any situation that requires AOE or cleave.

Kil'jaedens brennender Wunsch Still offers an absolutely absurd amount of stats for a single item and a single slot, as well as the single highest possible Strength gain of any slot. Still broken.

Tak'theritrix' Schulterpolster: Only manages to make it into S-Tier due to its stark requirement to maximize the effectiveness of the Dark Arbiter build, in conjunction with its buff in 7.2.5. Without Dark Arbiter, this legendary is solidly in B tier.

In this tier, we have legendaries that are very strong, when paired with other specific legendaries, or when used with specific builds.

Todesmarsch This legendary is extremely strong with Defile build, and can be used in conjunction with any other legendary item. Any Legendary in B tier or above will perform best.

Die vierte Lektion des Instrukteurs This legendary has seen better days. It is still very strong, but is best when paired with one of the S-Tier legendaries. It is also a great candidate for the Defile Build.

This tier is for legendaries that are strong in certain situations, but don't have particularly powerful DPS effects beyond their massive stat allocations or occasionally large bonuses.

Aggramars Schritte Still offers movement speed, better now that it gives you speed based on your best stat of the Big Three (Haste/Mastery/Crit)

Uvanimor, die Unschönheit Uvanimor, the Unbeautiful has always been one of those legendaries that just... is. It gives you runes. But not always. It's nice as a smoother, but not powerful by any means.

Sephuz' Geheimnis Before the change preventing Abomination from proccing Sephuz on demand, this legendary would have been in S tier for its massive synergy with Dark Arbiter alone. As it is, the utility of this ring is nice, but not particularly favorable. On a fight where you can interrupt frequently it can be better than some options. Otherwise, it is largely a stat stick.

Prydaz, Xavarics Magnum Opus Still here, still shielding. Prydaz will likely never fall out of favor as its massive shield and insane stats will always give it a place around someone's neck sometime, even if it is just as a placeholder. Not as good as some choices, but like most in this Tier, solid if you don't have many options in the upper tiers.

This tier is generally for legendaries that are alright, but not particularly great in any situations. The simplest way to say it is that they are "background" legendaries.

Draugr, Gurt des ewigen Königs Great stats, awful effect. Returns even fewer runes than Uvanimor on average. Is stronger in general without T19 resource generation, is still underwhelming in comparison with other options.

These last two legendaries don't offer much value beyond being high item level stat sticks.

Tuch von Acherus Many of the useful aspects of the Acherus Drages are covered by the Spell Eater talent, which should be enough said; but let's go further: This takes up a tier slot, it doesn't offer very much Strength, it requires you do have taken damage and be taking damage for the best part of its effect to work, when AMS is primarily used for preventing damage, not for healing it.

Rethus unerschöpflicher Mut Lots of sockets, Haste and Mastery. If you don't have a second legendary yet, and you can craft or buy this, go right ahead, it's a great starter. Replace it with anything from B Tier or above, the stats are hard to argue with. Otherwise, this is a rather lackluster legendary.

Recommended Tomb of Sargeras Gear

This is a general recommendation for gearing in The Nighthold. With Warforged and Titanforged possibilities, having a set list of items as being "best in slot" is impossible. In almost every situation, an increase in item level is going to be better, even if the stat allocation isn't perfect. (A few exceptions would include giving up Mastery on a slot for an lesser gain in Strength, as Mastery is one of our best stats, and almost equal to Strength in value most of the time.) For the Helm and Glove slots going into Tomb, the T19 2pc may preset stronger options than the ones presented here, but the value of T19 2-pc is still questionable. That said, here are some suggestion pieces you can try to hunt for:

Finding Gear on Wowhead

From simple recommendations to advanced filters, Wowhead can help you find the gear you want.

Item Finder

The Item Finder is a great way to search for gear if you are new to Wowhead's filtering system.

Choose what item category, gear slot, and class specialization you're interested in, and it will return results for you. You can further narrow it down by source--including gear from LFR and heroic dungeons.

Character Planner

The Character Planner returns personalized gear suggestions for you and shows which content has the most upgrades.

Simply load up the planner with you preferred character and it will list gear recommendations in a 20 ilvl range for you. It will also list how many gear upgrades each boss has so you can plan out bonus rolls. Finally, the character planner will perform an audit and let you know if you have any missing enchants, glyphs, or gems.

If you have a character in our Profiler which is great for tracking vanity collections and viewing your character in our 3D modelviewer, you can click on the "Planner" button in the header to access the tool. If you don't, you can just enter your information in at Tools > Character Planner.

Item Filters

Wowhead utilizes a powerful system of item filters to narrow down the gear you need.

On http://www.wowhead.com/items, you can enter in some basic options at the top--the name of the item, its item level, the level the players needs to be. The "Usable by" dropdowns cover factions, class, and role.

The dropdown menu right above "Stat Weights" opens to display a variety of advanced options. These cover the following:

General item info such as Added in Expansion/Patch, BoE/BoP, Unique-Equipped, Class-Specific.

Source: All in-game sources, ranging from raid difficulties to the Black Market Auction House to sold by a vendor.

Miscellaneous: Many of these filters are not relevant to equippable gear such as Crafting Reagents and Toys, but you can filter for items that are currently obtainable.

Once you've selected a filter from the menu, click on Apply filter for search results. You can repeat the process to filter for multiple criteria at once--for example, Agility gear that is found in Mythic Foundry.

Over on the right-hand side of the page, you can select a particular Gear Slot or Quality to narrow results even further.

Finally, you can quickly view a subset of items at once using the Database Menus. Head to Database > Items and mouseover the Weapon and Armor options for quick links to gear arranged by armor type and slot.